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This is an interview with Graham Morrison, who is one of four people behind the shiny-new Linux Voice magazine, which is printed on (gasp) paper. Yes, paper, even though it's 2014 and a lot of people believe the idea of publishing a physical newspaper or magazine is dead. But, Graham says, when you have a tight community (like Linux users and developers) you have an opportunity to make a successful magazine for that community. This is a crowdfunded venture, through Indiegogo, where they hoped to raise £90,000 -- but ended up with £127,603, which is approximately $214,288 as of this video's publishing date. So they have a little capital to work with. Also note: these are not publishing neophytes. All four of the main people behind Linux Voice used to work on the well-regarded Linux Format magazine. Graham says they're getting subscribers and newsstand sales at a healthy rate, so they're happily optimistic about their magazine's future. (Here's an alternate video link)

I subscribe to french Linux Magazine and Linux Pratique, two mags from the same editor and I enjoy reading them. First of all they have lots of info that you'd have to fish around the net to find. And here you don't need to even search for it. It's always up to date (well, the current month, d'oh), unlike web pages. And it's a good way to find NEW information, things you've never heard of before. And also it's a break from the computer, allowing you to sit and think for a while. The first mag is more for ad

Yes by all objective measures it's an inferior way to distribute and access data, but much like watching television vs streaming/on demand, it has it's charms and nuances that haven't been reproduced digitally.

Linux Voice specifically doesn't sound like my cup of tea based on reading the snippets on their site, but I can see where they might find an audience.

I cancelled my subscription to another Linux magazine when they dropped paper. I figure I get fresher news from my RSS feeds and more up-to-date and more detailed technical info from blogs and project websites.

I truly do love my tablet for reading fiction and even the occasional reference manual, but the ability to randomly flip through a dead-tree magazine and idly learn about something that may someday become important is something I treasure and an e-reader just doesn't do it for me.

Is that true, or is it really about some old people not being to adapt to newer and better technologies? Printing on dead trees and sending them to people via snail-mail just so they can get a nostalgic feeling is terribly inefficient. Magazines don't even offer basic features like moving pictures or keyword-search.

It's not a matter of adaption, it's a matter of, as you said, nostalgia.

And it goes way beyond the media itself. A magazine as an information source plays much differently than the internet.

If there's a market of people willing to pay for the nostalgia benefit, this could work. As in this context it's ultimately a luxury item (similar to a beer or a vacation), any arguments about wastefulness and inefficiency become silly.

Serendipity. It has not been digitally reproduced. Go to a large university library and go browse the stacks. There is no web experience like it. On a smaller scale, that is what the good corner Mom and Pop video store used to provide as well. Smaller yet, the local paper, then magazines. And when you said "like moving pictures or keyword-search" did you mean info-tainment and echo chambers? Or perhaps distractions and monomania? Training wheels and ADHD?

Saying that, there is, of course, a version of the magazine available in PDF format. The subscription price is actually reduced by a fair amount to compensate for the lack of dead trees too (take note, Amazon).

Yes by all objective measures it's an inferior way to distribute and access data, but much like watching television vs streaming/on demand, it has it's charms and nuances that haven't been reproduced digitally.

Linux Voice specifically doesn't sound like my cup of tea based on reading the snippets on their site, but I can see where they might find an audience.

My local (provincial government) library carries two Linux magazines. One from the UK (A4 paper size) and the second from France( in French and also A4 size) I look forward to reading both. The one from France has a very large readership and produces "specials", which are add-on publications that can be described as books. For example, a special about python. We are not looking at 9 pages, but 90. we are not looking at overviews, but indepth use and examples.the library maintains the back issues.The Eng

I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.

I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to i

I still don't understand why they're so hell-bent on eliminating the ability to follow older discussion threads in the comments section. Am I missing something? Is taking away our ability to see replies to our old comments somehow such a vital fucking part of Dice's new marketing strategy that it must be defended with their very lives if necessary?

> having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming

Especially since 8 years before WIn2K would place him someplace around VB3, and SMP was supported around NT 3.5 that way before this. And Reiserfs did exist at theat time. XFS and JFS were already available albeit as patches, and that filesystems technically are not supported in the kernel in either Linux or Windows. Or at the time Fortune 500 companies were using mostly mainframes and Suns for servers.

Someone should tell Satya you "get what you pay for" and tell him to pay more for their trolls. This guy

5.99 UK Pounds is a lot of money for a 116 page magazine, but it gives a higher per-page value than Linux Magazine (100 pages for 5.99) and Linux Format (100 pages for 6.49).

Linux Voice is a good magazine, though it has distribution issues. You can only find it in the town/city WH Smiths, rather than the railway stations where I buy most of my magazines. It's also difficult to find a copy with an attached coverdisc, since the glue they use is a

Sorry to hear that. We use Tictail for our shop, a Swedish company that focuses on small businesses. It's not evil. We'd like to handle payments ourselves (that's the plan at some point) but it's a huge job, and we're just a small team focusing on the magazine itself. If you really don't want to buy online, it's in newsstands around the world (Barnes and Noble at the end of the month).

Tictail may be OK (perhaps a bit of info in an "about us" page, to help us sort the good from the bad, and why you need them), but who are cloudfront.net? I shouldn't need to keep running queries through noscript.net just to buy a magazine with some confidence.